Qualities of coffee beans, from ripe fruit, kept in clean water for up to five days

Qualidades do café, de frutos maduras, conservados em água limpa por até cinco dias

Resumo

The use of compatible techniques, which allow family coffee growers to form larger batches of coffee, to be dried in commercial dryers and within their production reality, is very important in view of the scarcity of labor and demand for superior quality. As natural drying, depending on climatic conditions, may not produce high quality coffees, it is necessary that farmer maintain small daily harvests in conditions that can be transformed into a larger batch compatible with the capacity of conventional dryers, offered by the Brazilian industry. The acquisition of a dryer, which does not meet the entire harvest, can derail the process, with increased costs of acquisition, operational and incompatibility of the harvest / post-harvest systems. If the dryer capacity does not meet the harvest schedule at the peak of coffee maturation, when there will be a need for extra labor to avoid fruit fall, there will be losses due to reduced product quality. To solve the problem, this work was carried out on a farm with potential for coffee of superior quality, with 1100 meters of altitude located in the district of Embiruçu in the municipality of Mutum-MG, using the water storage technique, proposed by Machado (2005) for coffee harvested by hand striping, and confirmed by (Coelho et al., 2019) in the treatment of green coffee fruits, originated in wet processing. The results of this work show that the technology of immersion of fruits, recently harvested in water, for up to five days, did not impair the quality of the cup-proof and positively influenced the physical parameters used in the evaluation of the coffee type, indicating the possibility of aggregating small batches to enable the use of conventional dryers in the small coffee farms.